With the rapidly growing trend of mobile and remote data access over high-speed communication networks, such as 3G, 4G, or LTE cellular services, accurately delivering data has become increasingly challenging and difficult. A high-speed communication network that is capable of delivering information includes, but is not limited to, a wireless network, a cellular network, wireless personal area network (“WPAN”), wireless local area network (“WLAN”), wireless metropolitan area network (“MAN”), or the like. These networks typically utilize different transmission or network protocols based on industry standards for each protocol.
Currently, well defined baseband processing is used to implement each protocol across multiple chips or devices, which can include field programmable gate arrays (FPGA), application specific integrated circuits (ASIC), and digital signal processors (DSP). For example, in a transmitting device, data to be transmitted flows through specific pipelined stages implemented using multiple devices to generate a transmit signal that can be transmitted over the air (OTA). The devices of the pipelined stages provide specific functions, such as rate matching, encoding, and modulation. The functions of the pipelined stages can be reversed (demodulation, decoding, and rate dematching) in another set of devices to process received signals and convert these signals back to the original data.
However, conventional baseband systems have several limitations in that the existing pipelined stages implemented by the configured set of devices may not be suitable to process signals based on a particular protocol or standard. Thus, the pipelined stages may need to be changed or modified for each type of signal and/or protocol that is to be used. Unfortunately, changing current baseband systems implemented with multiple devices (e.g., FPGA and DSP devices) to process different protocols may require significant effort to redesign the architecture and associated hardware and software interfaces. Such changes may not even be possible once these baseband systems are in use out in the field. Furthermore, the alarming rate of evolving radio standards, the constant demand for new features, and short development time have made the limitations of conventional baseband systems even more apparent.
Therefore, it would be desirable to have a unified baseband architecture that provides for programmable pipeline processing thereby allowing a wide range of baseband functions to be performed to support different transmission formats and protocols utilized by evolving radio standards.